Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • When you haven’t a Clue You need an External drive for a backup but Macs are special. You need to find the, A drive that will work on your Mac. So the question is really how do you choose the right kind of external drive to back up your Mac? The key is to understand what you need so you can get to the bottom of Your specific wants and needs before you check out the choices. How best to do that? Stick with me to find out. Best Place to Start when you haven’t a Clue Is to understand what you have; In particular, what internal drives do you have on your Mac, and what physical ports – ports are the places where you physically plug the hard drive into. ![]() Because By knowing what internal drives you have tells you a lot about your range of choices. Find out by clicking on the Apple symbol, top right of your desktop screen and select about this Mac. System Report Storage Make a note of what is on your Mac. As the amount of drive space used equals the files and documents you will want to backup. You can dismiss the window by clicking on the small red button top left. Neither do I. However, it is frustrating that you have to sacrifice storage space because you spent the extra money to get a solid-state drive instead of the cheaper. The very newest Macbook Pro’s can be bought with up to 2TB of SSD internally, and the newest Macbook Air’s with up to 512 GB of SSD. SSDs are Solid State Disks drives and they are fast. Understand what is on your Mac and how much you are currently using. One Mac or Several If your plan is to backup several Mac’s then do the same with each Mac. Find out what type of drives they have. The total drive size and what is currently being used. What Interfaces are On Your Mac The next thing to find out is, what ports you have and if you haven’t a clue. Then it’s back to About your Mac, as above. This time when you get to the About your Mac screen, click on the system report button. Find Out What You have on Your Mac If you have an 802.11ac interface then you have a more modern Mac and fast Wifi. Why is this all relevant? Because it tells you what kind of external drive could be best for backup and your options for connecting those drives. You can dismiss the window by clicking on the small red button top left. Internal Disk Drives versus External What the difference is and why it’s important? I would just like to take a minute to explain the whole internal versus external thing just in case you think, wow I have so much free space, I’ll just backup to my internal hard drive. Why you typically do not backup to an internal drive A backup is your plan B or C depending on whether you have other places you keep copies of your data. It’s there in case the worst happens and you loose your Mac’s internal drive. If your backup, your insurance policy is on that same internal drive and you’ve had a drive crash then all your data is gone Including your backup. ![]() It is far better to keep your backup physically separately, on a hard drive that is external to your Mac – hence the term external drive. Office 2011 for mac popping up on startup. You can then, if the absolute worst happens restore your backup to a brand new Mac. There would be no way to do that if your backup was on your internal drives. So now that’s all cleared up let’s talk options. Internet explorer downalod for mac. Interfaces USB, USB C, Thunderbolt, Firewire, Wifi External drives are sold in a variety of capacities – storage sizes and with a range of interfaces. So let’s talk a bit about those interfaces. USB, USB C and Thunderbolt is the most popular interface. And here are the available options along with the theoretical speed of the interface. USB Version Speed USB 2.0 480 Mbit/s USB 3.0 5 Gbits/s USB 3.1 Gen 1 5 Gbits/s USB 3.1 Gen 2 10 Gbits/s It is important to note that these are theoretical maximum speeds that the interface and the drive could communicates at – ship your data back and forth, but there are overheads which mean that these speeds can be reduced in practice by 20 to 30 percent.
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